This chapter examines how conceptions of Asian American were formulated in the early twentieth century through the categorization of Asians as Orientals and their construction as a racial problem and a racial solution within mainstream American culture. The Chicago School of Sociology was instrumental in shifting the focus from biological notions of race, grounded in physicality and exemplified by eugenic theories, to culture-based concepts that included developmental theories of consciousness. The Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast was the most extensive sociological study of the Oriental Problem in the twentieth century. The drive to assert the significance of race over cultural notions of ethnicity has animated Asian American activism, writing, and scholarship for almost half a century. The Chicago School of Sociology has had a formative impact on Asian American literature over the course of the twentieth century. Asian American activists of the 1960s and 1970s valued early sociological accounts for their 'authentic voices'.